1. Field of the Invention
Exemplary embodiments of the present invention relate to a method and apparatus for calculating a document rank score. In particular, exemplary embodiments of the present invention relate to a method and apparatus for calculating a document rank score of documents in the dynamic World Wide Web (web) environment in which is documents are continuously added and deleted.
2. Discussion of the Background
A search service providing system (hereinafter, referred to as a ‘web search system’) may search for documents on the World Wide Web (web) and/or the Internet, may collect documents, and may calculate scores of the collected documents by reflecting contents and link information of the documents. When an inquiry is input by a user, the web search system may provide the user with documents having the highest relevance with the inquiry or a list of such documents.
Billions of documents or more are present on the web. Contents of some of the web documents may be partially changed or deleted. Additionally, new documents may be generated and some old documents may be deleted. Therefore, a status of web documents is continuously changing.
To provide users with high quality web search service, the web search system needs to calculate document scores with respect to the inquiry by continuously reflecting changes in the web, and to promptly reflect the calculated scores in a search result.
The web search system repeats collecting, indexing, link information analysis, and service reflection at regular time intervals. The time intervals may be varied according to search service companies, and are generally at least one week to two weeks.
Therefore, if the web search system is able to reflect a change of documents every time the changed documents are found, and provide users with documents highly related to the inquiry, user satisfaction with respect to the search is service will greatly increase.
The document scores in the web search service may be calculated by a combination of a content-based score of documents and a link-based score. Accordingly, a quick update of the content-based score of documents and the link-based score is necessary to promptly reflect the change of documents in a search result.